Interviews and Sales and New Stories and Reviews and Cover Unveilings, Oh My!

On Sunday, I was interviewed at Aspiring Authors Unite. Topics included my new novel (Campaign 2100), how to find a publisher, how I became interested in writing, how to make a protagonist a believable character, what characters are the hardest to write and why, “believable” vs. “Larger than life” characters, what makes my fiction unique, my writing process, the theory of “write what you know,” how to avoid info dumps, advice to starting writers, what I like to read and my favorite authors, and projects I’m working on now.

On Monday I sold a story to Galaxy’s Edge, “Manbat and Robin.” This is the humorous story of a bat that thinks it’s a superhero, and his silent partner, a robin. The story was inspired by an actual bat flying in my window at a writing workshop, “The Never Ending Odyssey,” an annual nine-day gathering of graduates of the six-week Odyssey Writing Workshop. The bat flopped about the apartment for about 15 minutes before we shooed it out. The story was originally titled “The Bat Nerd,” and then “Manbat,” the title it was submitted under. Editor Mike Resnick changed the title to “Manbat and Robin,” a nice improvement. It’s my third sale to Galaxy’s Edge, all this year, including a story in the current issue, “Pretty Pictures at War.” (Here are reviews of it at Tangent and SF Revu.) They are a SFWA pro market, so it’s a nice sale! (It’s my tenth “pro” sale and 75th overall.)

On Wednesday I finalized two new stories, “Rush City” (6200 words) and “Zombies Anonymous” (1000 words). I plan to submit both to The Never Ending Odyssey writing workshop this summer (July 22-30) for critique, along with one other story. The first is a somewhat comic takeoff on Westerns, with a gun-slinging centaur running for sheriff in Rush City – but he must first face off with elf bandits, the dwarf, the vampire, and the red-eyed unicorn, while protecting an overly talkative ogre and dryad bankers. The story has a huge twist! The second is about a math professor who turns into a zombie, but has all his normal thinking skills except for that mysterious thing he refers to as a “moral compass.” He eats his former colleague and discusses with his colleague’s daughter the Zombies Anonymous program while thinking zombie thoughts, and somehow tuna fish sandwiches keep coming up. The opening lines are, “A zombie has no moral compass. That’s why I had no compunctions about eating my best friend David.”